VANCE - Lot 80

VANCE WILLIAM VANCE XIII La Nuit du 3 août (T.7), Dargaud 1990 Original plate no. 9, prepublished in Hello BD n° 42, October 16, 1990. The second panel is a reproduction affixed to the mount. Signed. India ink and white gouache on paper 36.7 × 51 cm (14.45 × 20.08 in.) Since I wanted to take a break from XIII's personal research and couldn't fit it into a single 46-page volume, I did it in two volumes," says Jean Van Hamme of the diptych Le Dossier Jason Fly and La Nuit du 3 août. This allowed me to introduce a superb character: the wonderful Judith. I had to insist a lot on William not to make me, once again, an incendiary blonde. So he made her with black hair. I told him I didn't want her to be too beautiful, I wanted him to make her "just interesting" and explaining that to William wasn't easy. But I think he pulled it off. Judith is sin in the Bible. She's an interesting character who will feature in my script for the thirteenth album in the XIII Mystery series...". Two women pondering the "XIII enigma" makes for a wonderful sequence. With Jones, who has come back from everything, and Judith, who can't understand why anyone would resist her. Note the subtlety of the punctuation in the three silent panels, which show XIII while we're talking about him... This is one of the very few plates in which William Vance actually draws Zeke Hattaway's house (panel 7). Later, he would often reuse the reproduction of this drawing. Daniel Maghen